Bombay

“Are you sure about this?” was what I was often asked when I told anyone familiar with Mumbai that I was moving there. “You’re from Bangalore. Mumbai isn’t for people who are used to living in Bangalore.”

“I’m just going to jump and see what happens,” I’d say, hoping that was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure either.

In May 2008, I was 21 years old and had just graduated from a residential journalism programme in Bangalore, where I had spent the past year living and studying with friends that had become family. Through campus recruitments, many of them had been hired by companies in Mumbai and moved there. That was the first time I was curious about the city, this place that wasn’t far from where I grew up but that I knew nothing about.

In November of that year, during the terrorist attacks, I tried frantically to get in touch with them, desperate to hear that they were all okay. But a few months later, most of them had moved back to Bangalore, complaining about the rents, the commutes and the crazy work hours.

So when I was hired as a writer for the world’s best luxury travel magazine based out of Mumbai, I was ecstatic and terrified about going to a city that I had heard was unforgiving and stopped for no one.

At the time, I was also toward the end of what had been a year-long painful and bitter divorce. My life had been torn to tiny pieces and staying with my family in Bangalore seemed like such a safe, attractive option. But I also wanted to, needed to, get away. And this was a dream job. So I took it and moved to Mumbai.

This job, and this city, healed my broken heart in ways that I never imagined, that I never thought possible.

Have you seen an advertisement for Airbnb? Belong anywhere, it says. The service has created a worldwide community, for a fee, in times when we have lost what we once enjoyed for free. Until recently, we knew who our neighbours were. We wished each other in the street and asked about our families. Children played unsupervised in the neighbourhood.

But now we’re happier avoiding human interaction, usually hiding behind the screens of our smartphones, pretending that we’re either so busy or so intimately connected to someone on the other end that we’ve lost that natural community that used to develop organically. Where do we go now if we want to belong?

Mumbai, Bombay, which is what I have always called it, took me in and let me disappear. No one knew who I was or asked uncomfortable questions. No one shifted awkwardly when I entered a room, unsure how to make conversation without talking about my failed marriage. More importantly, it gave me someplace to get away from Bangalore, which was filled with memories of a person I had lost forever, but not to death, where I was constantly reminded of a life that I had tried so hard to build.

Bombay gave me someplace to belong.

It gave me a new home and new friends. It taught me to laugh again and made me independent. And it never let me feel alone.

Moving to Bombay saved me.

I still get asked what I love about the city. How can you possibly live there when you’re from Bangalore? It’s noisy and dirty, housing is a nightmare, there are too many people. I don’t disagree . But how do I explain that Bombay helped my heart to beat again, it helped me feel alive and well, and filled me with a new hope that everything would work out.

*A part of this writing appeared in a feature for www.cntraveller.in.